Invest India

Invest India is the country’s official agency dedicated to investment promotion and facilitation. Set up as a joint venture between FICCI (51% equity), DIPP (35% equity held by the Department of Industrial policy and Promotion, Ministry of Commerce & Industry) and State Governments of India (0.5% each), its mandate is to become the first reference point for the global investment community.

It provides granulated, sector-specific and state-specific information to a foreign investor, assists in expediting regulatory approvals, and offers hand-holding services.

Its mandate also includes assisting Indian investors make informed choices about investment opportunities overseas.

India has a strong foothold in investors’ emerging market strategies, despite the recent slowdown in economic activity, according to Enabling the Prospects, 2014 India Attractiveness Survey. Of the respondents who have an emerging markets strategy, nearly a fifth said that India accounts for more than 20% of their total capital allocated for the developing world.

Invest India partners with the official investment promotion agencies of several countries (USA, UK, France, Italy, Japan, Korea and Mauritius) to enhance investment and broader bilateral economic ties. In recent months, it has forged close ties with its counterpart agencies in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and is also the nodal agency for coordinating the investment-component of a joint initiative of the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry relating to Africa.

Over the past year, it has partnered with India’s diplomatic missions abroad and the economic ministries at home to provide specialized information to market-leading companies in select sectors through video conferences (including in Brussels, Berlin, Detroit, Seoul, and Brugges). During the same period, it has also disseminated similar information to investors at events abroad, including in China, Russia, Japan, United States and South Korea, and used these platforms to engage public and private sector investors.

While assisting the SME sector remains its core focus, Invest India is also working with some large companies and sovereign wealth funds who are considering substantial investments into India in the near term. Invest India’s work is guided by the recognition that while India ranks as the third most attractive FDI destination since 2006, it needs to substantially improve its ranking on the Ease of Doing Business indices employed by the World Bank and other reputed agencies.

By the end of 2012, Invest India hopes to develop sufficient capability to render project-specific assistance and facilitate investments into priority sectors identified by the central government – including the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor – and later leverage the vast opportunity created by the offsets policy in the defence, civilian nuclear and aviation sectors to drive technology-embedded investments into India.